‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III)

Abstract

In this paper I explore Walter Benjamin’s complex thoughts about the concept of experience to illuminate a central paradox when thinking about madness. This paradox concerns the need to hold together constellations of concepts that appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand there is the realm of the psychopathological; a psychiatric thinking of madness as mental illness that refers to suffering, loss of existence, and dysfunction. On the other hand, there is a thinking about madness as a diverse and different experience, as possibility, illumination, and difference. Benjamin’s writings on experience can be particularly fertile here because he acknowledges the contradictions in experience, at certain points emphasising the loss of experience and at other points focussing on the possibilities of a new experience even within a destruction of experience. I will explore three aspects of Benjamin’s reflections on experience and their relationship to an experience of psychosis; the loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that lie within such a loss, the turn towards the object in Benjamin’s account of experience, and finally the concept of the limit-experience. I conclude by considering Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image and apply this idea to the experience of madness.

Keywords:

• Walter Benjamin
• experience
• dialectical image
• psychosis
• madness

Introduction

Recent work on the experience of psychosis has split along three vectors or trajectories, that are often counterposed as in stark opposition. These trajectories all have their own histories and traditions and their own ideas of where the future of psychiatry might lie.

In one strand, psychosis is conceived as lack and absence. In his recent book ‘On Madness’, Richard Gipps (2022) offers a brilliant summation of this tradition that views madness as lack alongside a critique of any affirmative perspective on psychosis. For Gipps, the experience of psychosis is an experience of the loss of reason and the loss of a world, and this experience can only be approached by a via negativa, an understanding that all the usual ascriptions of meaning fall apart when the sane person attempts to understand the person experiencing psychosis. In a Wittgensteinian mode, Gipps pays attention to the way in which some of the things we might want most to say when approaching the experience of psychosis are those things that are most foreclosed or shut down in any attempt at understanding. However, the approach here is not purely deflationary but also ethical and therapeutic. Gipps (2022, p. 9) argues it is only in approaching psychosis as a fundamental absence and collapse of reason that we can ‘approach more closer to the psychotic subject in her brokenness’.

An opposite, affirmative strand is represented by Justin Garson’s book ‘Madness. A Philosophical Exploration’, where psychosis is reclaimed as a designed response to the environment, a response governed by a functional approach to madness. Rather than viewing madness as a lack, Garson (2022, p. 1) writes that in madness we see:

…the working out of a hidden purpose instead of a defect … a goal-driven process, a well-oiled machine, one in which all of the components work exactly as they ought.

Rather than lack, there is function, and rather than the absence or breakdown of reason, there is a furious working out of reason within madness, perhaps a different kind of reason, but one that is still governed by the goals of the self-maintenance and preservation of the person. Both Gipps and Garson counterpose an ahistorical concept of reason, in Gipps a philosophical notion of reason and in Garson an evolutionary concept of function, with its supposed opposite being madness. For Gipps, the opposition between madness and reason is fixed around the concept of lack, but in Garson’s case the opposition is dissolved around the concept of function. Indeed, for Garson, by the end of his text, madness in its alterity is dissolved. In the new space opened by the paradigm of ‘madness-as-strategy’ as he terms it, there are only different ways of being sane.

The third trajectory in recent texts on madness is represented by Wouter Kusters’ magisterial text entitled ‘A Philosophy of Madness. The experience of psychotic thinking’ (Kusters, 2020). Kusters’ major category for understanding madness as his subtitle suggests is not a contrast with reason, but an understanding of experience, of the experience of psychotic thinking, drawing upon his own experience of psychosis but also on an interrogation of a mad experience within philosophy itself, or even the maddening experience of thinking philosophically. For Kusters, what marks the experience of psychotic thinking is not lack or function, but excess. Kusters is far too subtle to simply affirm madness in its excess but, through a fundamental negativity within madness, there glimmers the promise of something different in the impossible experience of madness itself. Kusters offers a definition of madness that frames this excess within a social context marked by lack. He defines madness as ‘…the socially awkward expression of a desire for infinity in a world that defines itself as finite’ (Kusters, 2020, p.xxii). This definition will be returned to later in the paper when considering Benjamin’s thinking about the return of certain archaic experiences within modernity.

Kusters (2020, pp. 525–527) draws on a distinction made by Charles Taylor between the buffered self of the modern disenchanted subject opposed to the porous self of the pre-modern subject (porosity is a key concept for Benjamin in his writings on modern cities, as we will discuss later). In the buffered self of modernity, the subject is the bounded, property owner of their own internal experiences, that are guarded from the external world. Meaning is fashioned inwardly. In contrast, the pre-modern self is open to meanings founded externally, in objects and in the world, where the inner and the outer melds together in unforeseen and unforeseeable combinations. For Kusters, there is a great affinity between the pre-modern self and the psychotic person. They are both turned outwards towards a world of meaning that flows through them, in associations and connections that are not constructed conceptually, but in a sense found or intuited. But Kusters (2020, p. 527) is aware, in a very Benjaminian way, of both the possibilities and the dangers of the return of such archaic experiences within the space of modernity. What characterises these experiences of a porous self in modernity is a kind of loneliness, as they are not experienced in a community that shares them. However, there remain features and traces of such experiences that return and reconfigure themselves within modernity. They return singularly and sometimes explosively as distortions of a certain taken for granted sense of space and time.

Walter Benjamin and experience

It is Kusters’ emphasis on experience that leads us to the thought of Walter Benjamin. In his book on the modern concept of experience in European and North American philosophy, Martin Jay (2005, p. 315) writes of Benjamin’s work as ‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’ in modern philosophy. Benjamin’s work is concerned with unfolding an overlapping, discontinuous and contradictory account of experience in modernity, and his avowed intention is not to dissolve the contradictions he unfolds. This can make it difficult to try and get a foothold when articulating a concept of experience within Benjamin’s oeuvre, because there is no singular concept. At one point, Benjamin appears to be lamenting a loss of experience in modernity, and at another affirming new possibilities for experience within the radical changes he lived through. However, it is in an attention to the complexities in experience that Benjamin’s reflections may prove fertile when trying to philosophically capture the experience of psychosis.

There are three key aspects of Benjamin’s thought that can be helpful in thinking about psychosis for psychiatry. First, Benjamin’s reflections on historical changes within modern experience complicate any picture of a stable ‘norm’ of experience and draw attention to the ways that experience in modernity is fragmented, dispersed, and dislocated. Benjamin’s concept of experience fundamentally relates to a concept of the fractured subject of experience. This notion of a fractured subject that Betty Schulz (2023) has written about extensively in her recent monograph on Benjamin, brings his work into an implicit affinity with reflections on fragmentation in psychosis and schizophrenia. Giovanni Stanghellini (2024) has written about the importance of thinking about the relationship between sanity and madness dynamically in relation to limit-situations of our finite lives which are existentially rooted. Benjamin’s account of experience gives us a way of thinking these existential situations as charged historically, particularly through transformations in subject-object relationships in modern capitalism, and through transformations in the lived experience of space and time.

Second, Benjamin thinks about these historical transformations of core existential vulnerabilities as both possibilities for a loss of experience and the transformation of experience. As Stanghellini (2024, p. 163) writes:

States of depersonalization and derealization may emerge together with an overall condition of bewilderment, from which psychopathological symptoms or growth opportunities may arise.

Historical transformations in our experience can indicate both a loss and a fullness of experience. The difference between madness and sanity is fragile, but madness consists in an excessive or limit-experience, an experience where these transformations are lived with no possible way out. Both this lack and fullness are connected by essential existential vulnerabilities but also by the exacerbation of these vulnerabilities as lived by the fractured subject of modernity. Benjamin’s account of experience is alert to how the subject attempts to protect itself against the shocks of modern life. However this retreat to a ‘buffered self’ is a failure that results in a fundamentally fractured or fragmented self that is exemplified at its extreme point in the experience of psychosis.

Finally, Benjamin’s concept of experience is useful for thinking about how certain ‘outmoded’ or ‘antiquated’ experiences of the pre-modern self might return in the space of modernity within psychotic experiences. Whitney (1998, p. 1548), when writing about his experiences of psychosis in mania, or what he terms a ‘spiritual emergency’, writes that:

There are features in the territory of human experience that are deleted from the professional maps that psychiatrists use.

Feyaerts et al (2021) in their study of experiences of delusion, reported that participants felt that the psychiatric response to their experiences did not respond to the existential challenges of the psychosis itself. The categories of recovery that emphasised new growth and a new individuality could not contend with how the experience of psychosis itself shifted fundamental categories of experience and altered and transformed the person’s life in ways that could not easily be assimilated. Sofia Jeppsson (2023, p. 314) writes about the importance of thinking of experiences of psychosis as lack, difference, and excess:

…it may sometimes be possible to describe the same purported phenomenon as either a lack, a difference, or even as having something extra that the sane and neurotypical people lack … one lacks proper premises to draw conclusions from, lacks a proper appreciation of reality – or one might describe it as something extra, having extra experiences that the sane lack, or joining more ideas in more combinations.

The third element in Benjamin’s concept of experience is an attention to a limit-experience. Stanghellini (2021, p. 21) writes of a dialectic in human experience between form and an experience of formlessness, and there are dangers in freezing this dialectic in either a too-fixed identity of a formed subject or a total descent into formlessness that can occur in psychosis. Benjamin pays close attention to experiences of formlessness that have been repressed by modernity and that return in limit situations and that have a great affinity with many accounts of psychosis. However, for Benjamin, the point is not to uncritically affirm these experiences as an impossible re-enchantment in modern societies but to pay attention to the ways that, as repressed experiences, they return within modern, secular experience. Such an account can orient us to ways of working with psychosis in order to pay attention to the significance that these experiences hold for patients even though they are often difficult to give an account of narratively (see Stanghellini, 2023b).

Erlebnis and Erfahrung

In order to orient ourselves to Benjamin’s thinking on experience, it is necessary to refer to the two terms used in German for experience, namely Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The concept of experience as Erfahrung is historically prior to the coinage of Erlebnis that becomes formalised at the end of the nineteenth century.

There are two distinct usages for Erfahrung in German philosophy. First, there is an epistemological usage that is largely derived from Kant’s philosophy. For Kant, experience lies in a conjunction of the conceptual ordering of sense data that is bounded by the a priori forms of intuition (namely space and time). For Kant, these are universal structures that are the grounds for our experience of the world. Erfahrung names the process where the subject organises the outer, sense impressions in accordance with the categories of the understanding and the forms of intuition (space and time). Benjamin is interested in the Kantian use of Erfahrung but attempts to work through and beyond Kant in two distinct ways. First, he is fundamentally hostile to the idea of setting up the problem of experience as structured by the picture of a separate subject that receives sensations and then forms these raw data into concepts. For Benjamin, experience is always a mode that overturns the traditional picture of subject-object relationships. Secondly, Benjamin wants to conceive experience as something that moves beyond questions of the certainty of knowledge, and towards what he terms in an early essay on Kant a ‘higher concept of experience’ (Benjamin, 1996, p. 102). There is an experience that moves beyond the Kantian problematic of epistemology, and it does so primarily by collapsing subject-object distinctions and by introducing discontinuities and rifts in the Kantian forms of intuition. For Benjamin, experiences of time and space are not universal structures of experience but are lived encounters with the world that shift and mutate historically.

Minkowski (1927/2002) famously wrote about structural alterations and distortions of both lived space and lived time in the experience of psychosis. The person experiencing psychosis loses a fundamental grounding in the world that fractures an ability to live their lives towards the future and results in a morbid geometrism where fixed forms and objects predominate over fluid and more organic bodily relations with the outside world.

Stanghellini et al. (2020, p. 531) investigated alterations in the lived experience of space in a cohort of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and describe the following features:

…a sense of space being infinite, stretching on forever. This is accompanied by a sense of displacement. This may manifest as an ontological focus, in which the mere existence of objects – rather than their practical significance – is what stands out. They may feel they have no definite point of view on the world – they feel displaced or out of place. Space may also take on an uncanny atmospheric quality, as if the space itself is threatening or foreboding or has some special (but inarticulable meaning).

Benjamin sees this fragmentation in lived space and lived time as one of the core limit-experiences of modern life but understands it both as loss and possibility. In a peculiar compression of time and a range of spatialising activities and gazes, he outlines both a loss of experience and the possibility of a different kind of experience, a metaphysical experience that he sees as ‘manifest in the warps, tears and incongruities of experience’, as Caygill (1998, p. 44) writes. Just as in the fragmentation of experience within psychosis, the Kantian forms of intuition are not stable but in a state of ‘continual but discontinuous transformation’ in modern experience (Caygill, 1998, p. 124). Benjamin’s account of the historical instabilities within modern experience gives us a rich understanding of how core existential vulnerabilities are reshaped within modern societies and how changes in everyday experience relate to experiences of psychosis as excessive instances of such historical changes. The experience of psychosis is an existential vulnerability of being human, but such a vulnerability takes different forms in different historical periods.

The second way that Erfahrung gets deployed in German philosophy is more indebted to Hegel’s philosophy and the idea of experience as a journey that is dependent upon a tradition and a gradual accretion of knowledge over time. Such a concept of experience presumes an individual who can order and unify an experience through an accumulated memory and sedimentation of tradition and community. This concept of Erfahrung is very important to Benjamin and central to many of his reflections on the loss of experience in modernity, but he is also very critical of a Hegelian approach. For Benjamin, history does not unfold progressively, according to the logic of a linear time, but can best be understood as the site of discontinuity, an intermingling of past images with present crises, and the sudden interruption of previously outmoded objects and forms of life. The relationship between tradition and experience is furthermore constantly in question. Tradition enables the survival of experience, but also threatens its creativity, and stifles it within repressive forms. In modernity, the possibility for a tradition to be transmitted through the dual process of destruction and renewal becomes increasingly fragile, as the stark alternatives of revolution and catastrophe are faced, with the rise to power of National Socialism in Germany in the last decade of Benjamin’s life. Benjamin is very interested in the notion of a fulfilled and completed experience but sees this not in the completion of the progress of history, but in moments that return from the past, memories from childhood, or the fleeting fulfilment of wishes (see Ikkos, 2021). Here, there remains a possibility of the completion of experience, an ‘…experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time’ (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 175). However, such experiences are moments that stand out from the course of history.

Whenever Benjamin wants to write something positive about experience he will use the term Erfahrung. If he uses the term Erlebnis it is always with a negative valence. However, it would be a mistake to characterise Benjamin’s thought as one that upholds a concept of Erfahrung and downplays a concept of Erlebnis, but rather Benjamin’s use of the concept of experience is heterodox and moves both within and between these two categories.

Gadamer (2013) outlines the history of the term Erlebnis that he states first came to prominence in the 1870s in biographical writing and refers to both an immediacy to experience and a subjectivity of experience. Erlebnis, that is translated as ‘lived experience’ is linked to a reaction against the restriction of reason to a narrow, cognitive, and instrumental form of reason. The Kantian attempt to model experience upon the forms of certainty characteristic of the natural sciences was seen as a radical reduction and dehumanisation of experience. Dilthey (1988, p. 173) writes that:

There is no real blood flowing in the veins of the knowing subject fabricated by Locke, Hume and Kant, but rather the diluted lymph of reason as mere intellectual activity.

Martin Jay (2005, p. 11) writes of Erlebnis as emphasising subjectivity, interiority and an ‘intense and vital rupture in the fabric of quotidian routine’. There is thus an affinity between this concept of lived experience and ideas of the experience of psychosis that emphasise experience at the limits, as excess and as ineffable.

When Benjamin writes of lived experience (Erlebnis), he will often write against the grain of such a history. He is very sceptical of any invocation of the authenticity of lived experience and is particularly hostile to those writers who returned from World War I and tried to invoke an authenticity of the battlefield and laud an experience of fighting that moves the self into new paroxysms of ecstasy (the so-called Fronterlebnis) (Benjamin, 1979). After his engagement and encounter with Marxism in the 1920s, and particularly with the concept of reification that Lukács developed in the early 1920s, Benjamin reads the central experiences of the capitalist form of life as forms of Erlebnis where all experience is warded off and can no longer register as an experience (what he famously terms Chockerlebnis – the experience of shock). Benjamin’s idiosyncratic reading of Erlebnis is a reading of lived experience as the destruction of experience rather than an authenticity and integrity of individual experience. However, he remains deeply interested in experiences that can rupture and stand out against the course of history, experiences that often escape any rational or communal reconstruction. Therefore, Benjamin’s work holds open both the extreme loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that might lie within that loss, how new forms of experience might arise or return from the past. This heterodox and discontinuous reflection on experience can be very fertile when thinking about the experience of psychosis across the different vectors of lack, function, and excess.

In the next section, I want to think about three aspects of Benjamin’s reflections on experience and their relationship to an experience of psychosis; the loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that lie within such a loss, the turn towards the object and the dissolution of the self in experiences of objects and finally the limit-experience and the contradictions within the limit-experience.

Loss of experience

As Margaret Cohen (2004, p. 201) points out, a key starting point for Benjamin’s account of the loss of experience in modernity is a reading of Lukács’s text History and Class Consciousness and particularly the central chapter on the concept of reification. Benjamin studied the book with Asja Lācis and Ernst Bloch in 1924 and the reading of Lukács was a significant turn in Benjamin’s move towards a more materialist understanding of experience and a recasting of his earlier theological concerns.

Lukács (1971) outlines a concept of reification that he draws from the section on the fetishism of commodities in Marx’s Capital and constructs an account of the development of a form of reason that forgets its grounding in life-processes and takes the appearance of a rigid, fixed, objective, instrumental reason. Human processes are transformed into things. As Lukács described it, reification is the result of commodified capitalism. The relation of the worker to his or her product is transformed from a process of creation to a process where the object is disconnected from the labour invested in it. As commodity it comes to stand outside the worker, as both the property of another, and as simply an item of exchange. Under capitalism, people come to view other people purely in terms of their economic usefulness or as possible threats in the fight for economic survival. The individual takes a view on their own abilities and potentialities as resources that can maximise their economic productivity. The features of reification then are the mode in which a process or relation is turned into a thing, under the pressure of commodified capitalism; the feeling of being crushed by objects, overwhelmed by what are petrified human relations frozen as objectifications that come to have power over human being; a preponderance of quantification; the worker’s time is divided up into units of profitable labour; a world of identity, in which everything is measured in terms of its value for exchange; the individual him or herself viewing themselves as a thing; and, finally an ahistorical view of the world (the future can only be conceived as the impingement of objective, natural forces not subject to human control).

In the essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin (1999a) outlines a process where experience as grounded in a form of tradition (Erfahrung) deteriorates to an experience that is an instantaneous and reflexive reception of information that cannot be assimilated or integrated into a longer form of experience. Lived experience (Erlebnis) represents this deterioration of an accumulated experience into information:

The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. (Benjamin, 1999a, pp. 155–156)

The form that sensation takes in modernity, is a specific form of lived experience, namely shock, which consists in a constant alertness to the continual battery of excitations that surround the individual. Benjamin has three models for this kind of shock experience: the experience of the modern city, the experience of the worker at the machine, and the gambler.

In the modern city, the pedestrian is submitted to a flow of sensation and movement that enables no space for reflection, but a torrent of unassimilated excitations and nervous impulses:

At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 171)

This shock experience of city life is a mirror image of the worker at the machine, an experience of adapting and moulding the self to the functions of technology in an automatic and jerking response. In gambling, time itself is reduced to the moment of the bet, and gamblers are reduced to completely following the operations of the card game or the roulette wheel. Their sensibility and emotions are completely trained in response to a machine, and this produces an emptiness of experience that is shared by both the gambler and the worker in the factory, a futility and inability to find any completion in activity.

Benajmin’s conclusion is that in modernity, Erfahrung has deteriorated into Erlebnis, in the experience of shock:

The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli: the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung) tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis). (Benjamin, 1999a, p. 159)

As Richard Wolin (1982, p. 19) notes, not only has the nature and quality of experience deteriorated in modern life, but shock experience dissolves the ability to reflect upon and understand this development and possibly to find measures to ameliorate such tendencies in modern life. In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin writes of the rapid atrophy of the ability to assimilate and communicate experience from within a context of tradition, that results in a loneliness pervasive to modern experience:

It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest amongst our possessions were taken from us: the ability to experience. (Benjamin, 1999b, p. 83)

An experience in the form of storytelling, that initially rested in an oral tradition and a shared understanding is replaced by a new form of communication based on information that is instantaneous and ephemeral.

The power of Benjamin’s lament over the loss of experience should not, though, obscure another side of this account. Benjamin wants to try and delineate new possibilities within the loss of experience. He is not interested in a conservative or reactionary account of the loss of tradition. He does not think that we can somehow return to an age of traditional storytelling. Rather, he wants to try and think about both the irrevocable loss of experience and the possibilities of new and different sensibilities that might lie within that loss. The route to new possibilities is not through a retreat to a subjective experience, but by a turning outwards towards objects, and experiences where distinctions between subject and object are undermined and blurred. In the degradation of experience within commodified capitalism, Benjamin will paradoxically turn to the object as a way of detaching it from functionality and opening the self to a different experience. Is there a way of being possessed by the object, of dissolving subjectivity, that might counter reification, and chart a path through the destruction of experience in modernity?

A turn to the object

The subjective experience of reification is a reversal of agency, an encounter with objects that results in a fundamental passivity of experience, as Schulz (2023, p. 89) writes this is an ‘encounter with the object that results not in its possession but in a possession by it’. Benjamin’s response to the commodified production of subjectivity in modernity is not to emphasise the agency of the subject, but rather to think a different mode of relating to objects and a different kind of passivity. Benjamin will think through reification to try and awaken different, and often outmoded aspects of our relationship with objects.

This results in a transformation of the Kantian forms of intuition, in experiences that both compress and complete time, and in an emphasis on a fragmentary concept of space, that emphasises discontinuities, gaps in experience and moments that can nevertheless open themselves in sudden vistas and expanses of the imagination. Susan Sontag (1981, p. 119) characterises this as a melancholy imagination in Benjamin, as she writes:

…the deep transactions between the melancholic and the world always take place with things (rather than people) … The melancholic sees the world itself become a thing: refuge, solace, enchantment.

This is the experience of a reified world, where all human processes are commodified. However, Benjamin is also interested in how the experience of this world of material objects can harbour different possibilities and openings beyond commodification. The melancholic gaze is also a common description of an experience of ‘unreality’ that is central to psychosis, or what Louis Sass (2017) has written of as a central mood or attunement within psychosis. Describing the famous account of psychosis given by Renée, Sass (2017, p. 28) writes of her sense of unreality in the early stages of psychosis, as one where an:

… encroaching madness would seem to be out there in the world, embedded somehow in the look of material objects and in the forms of space and time … a universe of uniform precision and clarity but devoid of the emotional resonance, and sense of human purpose that are characteristic of everyday life.

Benjamin’s openness to the object is marked by a singular sensitivity to the ‘look of material objects’ but penetrates through the lifelessness of modern experience to uncover experiences that open up different possibilities in the encounter with objects. Benjamin (1999a, p. 184) relates this to a ‘perceptibility’ that he links to one of his key definitions of aura; ‘To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in turn’. If both experiences of psychosis and reification can petrify the world, the answer for Benjamin is not in an assertion of subjective purpose and control but in an opening of the self towards objects. I will consider three central experiences where Benjamin discusses this opening towards the object: mimesis, porosity and collecting.

Central to Benajmin’s work is a constellation of concepts of mimesis, similarity and correspondence. When Benjamin does offer an unequivocally positive account of experience it is nearly always categorised in one of these terms. In a fragment on experience written between 1931 and 1932, Benjamin (1999c, p. 553) writes that:

Experiences are lived similarities. What is decisive here is not the causal connections established over the course of time, but the similarities that have been lived.

Benjamin then connects this notion of lived similarity to a concept of Romantic observation and ‘perceptibility’ that he first unfolded in the early thesis on German Romanticism. This observation is not a conceptual classification of an object but a ‘reading’ of the meaning of an object through an immersion in its life, what Goethe terms a ‘tender empiricism’. Benjamin (1997a, p. 252) cites this notion of a tender or delicate empiricism in the essay on ‘A Small History of Photography’, where he writes of Goethe’s remark that ‘There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory’. In Ikkos et al.(in press), we have outlined the centrality of the concept of non-sensuous similarities to Benjamin’s thinking of experience, and a concept of perception as reading the object in its unfolding connections with other objects and historical time. Ross (2020, p. 93) has defined Benjamin’s concept of mimesis as the:

… recognition and production of similarity in a free interplay between subject and object.

It is crucial that the similarity is both received and produced and thus contains elements of an archaic mimicry of nature that is increasingly translated over time into non-sensuous similarities contained within language itself. Benjamin feels that this mimetic faculty constituted by play and similarity marks a fragile space within modernity and that our contemporary world only contains residues of ‘… the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples’ (Benjamin, 1999d, p. 161). He argues that these correspondences have increasingly migrated into language and the work of art as a space for both producing and receiving correspondences, but he is also interested in producing his own correspondences through the juxtaposition of different fragments of experience from historical periods with contemporary experiences, introducing interruptions and fragmentations to historical, chronological time.

In two papers on the logics of discovery in psychiatry, Stanghellini (2023a, 2023b) links a hermeneutic for emergent meaning in the psychiatric encounter in an attention to the fragmentary images both produced and received within psychotic experience. What is important in this attention to fragments is an awareness of correspondences of meaning within psychosis that can both result in a complete fragmentation but also in surprising and emergent connections and forms of meaning that are not reducible to causal schemas. What is central to Benjamin’s understanding of similarities is their ephemerality and fragility:

The perception of similarity is in every case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot really be held fast as can other perceptions. (Benjamin, 1999e, p. 695)

Benjamin sees the gift for seeing similarities as vestigial residues of a larger connection and compulsion to mimetic behaviour, but in this residue there lies a different possibility of releasing the object from the spell of commodification.

In his essay on ‘Naples’, co-written with Asja Lācis and published in 1925, Benjamin and Lācis (1997b) offer a complementary and opposing concept to that of shock when understanding the innervations of modern city life, namely porosity (for an account of Lācis, see Ikkos, 2023). What characterises city life in Naples is a time of sudden transitions and a view of spatiality as porous. The architecture is provisional, and it is difficult to discern what is in a state of building and what in a state of ruin. Living spaces are half inwards and half outwards, arranged to meld and mark an indiscernibility between the exterior and the interior. Life is marked by a fundamental provisionality, uncertainty and mobility, but rather than experiencing this as shock, the self is dissolved into a form of joy: ‘So everything joyful is mobile: music, toys, ice cream circulate through the streets … Irresistibly the festival penetrates each and every working day. Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere’ (Benjamin and Lācis, 1997b, p. 171).

There is certainly an element of a romanticising gaze in Benjamin and Lācis’s celebration of the city life of Naples, but the essay offers a different lens for viewing the destruction of experience in modern city life. What is experienced in the porosity of Naples are new possibilities for communal living that can escape the confines of bourgeois life in a communal experience that does not allow a space for reflection; a constant and inexhaustible mobility and productivity of life, shock transformed into porosity.

If mimesis represents a conscious letting go of subjectivity in a turning outwards towards correspondences and meanings in objects and porosity the possibilities of an overwhelming experience of public life that undoes the separation of subject and object, in his reflections on collecting Benjamin outlines a third modality of the turn to the object. The collector transforms the object from its index as commodity within capitalism in a turn against functionality and the instrumentalism that capitalism imbues to our relations with objects. However, in the act of collecting there is a closeness of pathology and possibility. Benjamin (2002, p. 204) writes of collecting that it creates a relation to its objects that is:

…the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this ‘completeness’. It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection.

Collecting, too, alters the lived sense of time. Benjamin (2002, p. 207) writes about the way that the collector lives in a different rhythm of time according to a relationship to different objects. The collector lives time through the collection, the way that certain invested objects light up the world: ‘… for the collector, the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects’. However, collecting for Benjamin is a contradictory experience, a ‘productive disorder’, both an experience of significance and a ‘struggle against dispersion’ (Benjamin, 2002, p. 211). The collector attempts to recover a unity within a world of dispersed experiences and in doing so to figure a different and non-instrumental way of relating with objects, but such an attempt has its own pathology, its fixed determination, its sense of order, its closing down and foreclosing of the opening and possibilities of other experiences, and a repetitive attention on cataloguing experiences.

Stanghellini (2023b, p. 5) has written of the tradition within phenomenological psychopathology that outlines a fragmentation of the experiential world in schizophrenia and that contains a pathological similarity to Benjamin’s account of collecting, in the specific experience of itemisation in schizophrenia. Itemisation is marked by a fragmentation of objects, the breaking up of a scene and the captivation of attention by isolated details (Stanghellini, 2023b, p. 5). Stanghellini (submitted) also writes of the fascination within schizophrenia with fragments and waste products and writes of the ‘fragment of the world that does not fit together’. This brings to mind those figures we see, experiencing ongoing psychosis, collecting scattered items of refuse from the street. Minkowski (1958) famously wrote of a patient with schizophrenic depression who had a complex delusional system to do with a ‘politique des restes’, a residue politics, where he feels that every fragment and leftover item in the world is being preserved for the end of time when he will then be forced to ingest them all. Minkowski writes:

Every leftover, all residue, would be put aside to be one day stuffed into his abdomen – and this, from all over the world … Everything would be included without exception. When one smoked, there would be the burnt match, the ashes and the cigarette butt. At meals, he was preoccupied with the crumbs, the fruit pits, the chicken bones, the wine or the water at the bottom of the glass … And all this he would have to swallow. (Minkowski, 1958, p. 128)

This is a kind of reverse, negative redemption of fragments that in a paranoid and terrifying experience are being collected as an end of the world punishment and reckoning.

Benjamin’s account is concerned with a totality of experience in modernity which through the experience of commodification tends towards a kind of deadness in modern life. Daniel Heller-Roazen (2007) has written of how psychiatry from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century discovers a series of affects that are concerned with this feeling of numbness. He cites Pierre Janet writing of a patient, Laetitia, who reverses Descartes’ famous cogito, ergo sum: ‘Undoubtedly I think, but I do not exist’, she says (Heller-Roazen, 2007, p. 288).

What Heller-Roazen outlines here is very similar to phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia as an ipseity disorder; a loss of a fundamental, affective connection to life. This leads to a tendency within phenomenological psychopathology to view schizophrenia as purely constituted by lack. But, as Stanghellini (2021) notes, it is important to take account of both diminished and exaggerated agency in psychosis. Benjamin is significant here, because he views possibilities within the breakdown of experience, and can give a glimpse into both a loss of experience and the possibilities that might also lie within that loss, without either a romanticising view or a purely negative psychopathological gaze.

Limit-experience: to the planetarium

In a recent paper on the Ipseity Disorder Model of schizophrenia, Feyaerts and Sass (2023), articulate a refinement of the model that focuses both on diminished and exaggerated feelings of self-presence in schizophrenia, noting that many experiences of psychosis consist of a shift between ‘poles of ‘diminished’ versus ‘expanded’ selfhood’, and it is just such shifts that Benjamin notes in his account of the experience of modernity, and that Stanghellini (in press) points out in his account of transformations in experience and the formation of identities in contemporary life.

These experiences of both contraction and expansion of the world in psychosis are often experienced as transformations in lived experiences of space and time. In her account of psychosis, Mørck (2021, p. 934) gives an insight into these transformations as a loss of pre-reflective experience, where:

Time and space dissolve; all is distorted. It seems as objects in the external world freeze and is devoid of meaning. People are atomized entities that move on a blurry surface of being.

However, she also has experiences of fulfilled time, of great mystical depth and wonder:

Light appears like a laser beam and penetrates my body through the scalp and into the brain. Thoughts explode and scatter like molecules. A state of euphoria absorbs everything. The universe expands, grows, and ideas crystallise and show themselves clearly … Overwhelmingly, the world lights up with frighteningly beautiful clarity. I merge with the surroundings and transcend. (Mørck, 2024, pp. 236–237)

Although very sceptical about the concept of Erlebnis throughout his work, Benjamin is intensely interested in experiences that break down the self in a larger experience, an attempt to understand an experience of infinitude that is close to madness, an experience that A.W. Moore (1997, p. 257) has written about as one where ‘…we fantasise about an infinitude where what we will, what we know and what is are all one’. Benajmin’s interest and experimentation with hashish, his preoccupation with dream experiences, and collective archaic images all attest to this side of his thought.

Benjamin sees dream experiences and forms of intoxication as preparatory experiences for what he terms famously in the surrealism essay, a ‘profane illumination’. Benjamin (1997c, p. 227) writes:

In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful living experience (lebendige Erfahrung) that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication … But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever can give an introductory lesson.

Although Benjamin is certainly, in certain moods, attracted by a dissolution of subjectivity, and interested in experiences where the subject is opened to different possibilities, he is also fully aware of the dangers of irrationalism. The most compressed, evocative and illuminating expression of the limit-experience is contained in the short piece that concludes Benajmin’s modernist masterpiece from 1928, ‘One-Way Street’. The book is a montage of experiences from the modern city arranged around a series of titles or placards that announce small thought-images. The final piece ‘To the Planetarium’ is in many ways a reflection on the definition of madness that we cited earlier from Kusters (2020, p.xxii), namely that madness is ‘…the socially awkward expression of a desire for infinity in a world that defines itself as finite.’

Benjamin (2016, pp. 93–94) begins the piece by referring to an experience from antiquity, an experience of the cosmic powers, an experience of infinitude:

Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods … the ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been very different: the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest to us, and never of one without the other.

However, as we saw with Kusters’ account earlier, Benjamin is not suggesting an affirmation of such an experience of infinitude as though one can return to archaic experiences that were once shared as a communal experience. There is no straightforward re-enchantment of the world. Nevertheless, these experiences cannot just be dismissed as though they existed in the past and have been completely surpassed by a modern process of secularization. Benjamin (2016, p. 94) writes that:

It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.

One cannot domesticate or commodify such experiences by dipping into them by a visit to the planetarium and sampling a faint after-effect of what the experience of the cosmos might have been in ancient times. These experiences return but in unexpected and unforeseeable, sometimes dangerous forms. Such experiences combined with technology can produce a new cosmic experience marked by planetary warfare. Benjamin (2016, p. 94) refers to the First World War as a site of a:

…new and unprecedented conmingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean space thundered with propellers … This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology.

If there is a communal cosmic experience in modernity it lies in global, planetary warfare. This is a dangerous return of irrationalism. But such irrationalism cannot be avoided by denying the experience that it springs from. Hidden even within the desperate experience of warfare, there lies the possibility of a different relationship to technology which might mould a different sensibility of humanity, but it must be grasped as a progressive possibility:

The paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call ‘Nature’. In the nights of annihilation of the last war the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempts of mankind to bring the new body under its control. (Benjamin, 2016, p. 95)

Benjamin suggests that hidden within the terrible form that such a cosmic experience takes in planetary war (and one could add the various catastrophes that are to follow in the twentieth century that this piece seems to foretell to some degree) there lies the possibility of deciphering an experience that can be utilised creatively rather than destructively. It is not therefore a matter of re-enchanting modernity through madness, but of deciphering and paying attention to how certain limit-experiences might return in contemporary society and take dangerous communal forms, but also might promise a different kind of embodied experience, a different kind of nature.

A dialectical image of madness

Contemporary debates around the meaning of psychosis coalesce to a certain extent around an opposition between dysfunction or lack and function or purpose. Underlying this contrast is a reliance on a denuded concept of experience. Viewing madness as a complete loss of experience relies on an approach that gazes at madness from the position of a sane and stable experience, from a sanity that is grounded in a presence in the world, which itself is not historically mediated. Affirming psychotic experiences as functional dissolves the strangeness of those experiences into a larger system of normality based on evolutionary design. Once these experiences are decoded then they enter a trajectory of self-preservation; they become functional.

As Kusters (2023a, p. 30) notes, such an ostensible conflict shares an underlying commitment to a concept of experience:

… patients (and non-patients alike) are ideally integral, coordinated and coherent human beings, of whom the identity or inner core is more than the sum of its parts.

This results in an attention to an experience of recovery that downplays the strange experiences of the psychotic crisis itself.

To appreciate the rich complexity and contradictions within psychotic experience we need a dialectical image of madness, an approach that doesn’t attempt to resolve the contradictions within the experience of psychosis but is able to hold together conflicts, opposing tendencies, and possibilities of loss and fullness. In Ikkos et al. (in press), we cited Benjamin’s definition of the dialectical image as ‘…a form of thinking which comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions’ (Benjamin, 2002, p. 475), and further clarified this complex but key concept of Benjamin’s thought. When thinking of a dialectical image of madness, I am proposing an image that is both existentially and historically charged with the account of experience that Benjamin unfolds. It therefore problematises any simple opposition between sanity and madness by outlining the way that any understanding of madness is situated itself within historical forms of experience that have their own pathology. Robert Desjarlais (1997, p. 24) criticises an understanding of experience and subjectivity as universal constants, as if ‘they were transcendental categories the contents of which culture completes as rain fills a bucket’. This is not to deny the importance and centrality of an understanding of psychotic experiences that relates them to fundamental experiences of human existence, but dialectical images of madness pay attention to both the historical form in which an image of madness takes shape and how outmoded or antiquated experiences might return in unforeseen ways in the space of modernity.

Such a dialectical image itself is not an attempt at producing another master narrative on psychosis but an understanding that is local, provisional and open. Didi-Huberman (2017, p. 260) writes of these images as:

… always singular: local, incomplete, in short, insubstantial – micrological in so many words. On the other hand, they are universally open: never entirely sealed off, never completed …

Stanghellini (2023a, p. 6) writes of such a network of images as an ‘open construction’ that provides us with a ‘space for thought’. In the concluding section of the paper, I want to consider some elements of a possible dialectical image of madness that might provide such a space for an open construction.

If there is an image of schizophrenia that dominated twentieth century psychiatry, it was one of madness as a radical absence, a ‘lifeless life’, to use a famous phrase from Robert Jay Lifton (1979). Perhaps, we are now at the beginning of a different construction of madness, but any straightforward affirmation of madness is itself problematic. Kusters (2023b, p. 319) writes that an attempt to ground the experience of madness in an affirmative paradigm, as based on ‘Mad Pride’, must move beyond explanations and understandings based on lack and towards a questioning of the ‘deepest assumptions of psychopathology’, namely a questioning that the experience of psychosis is characterised by suffering and absence. Whilst I am sympathetic to a questioning of psychopathology based on lack and a bracketing of the psychopathological gaze, I am concerned about not acknowledging the suffering and loss of experience in psychosis.

What Benjamin’s reflections on experience give us is an understanding of the experience of psychosis as placed within a continuum of pathology rather than normality. A continuum of pathology attempts to relate the experience of psychosis to transformations in the historical conditions of experience in contemporary society, transformations that cause an absence or loss of experience at the heart of ‘normal’ experience. Benjamin’s attention to the loss of experience in modernity gives us several fertile routes for thinking about psychosis in this way.

We should not just jettison the tradition of psychopathology in an empty affirmation but enlarge our understanding to make space for the possibilities of experience within psychosis, possibilities that might lie within experiences that distort or transform our lived sense of space and time, experiences that Kusters writes so skilfully about. Such experiences raise questions of the re-enchantment of experience, and the recovery of archaic experiences. These are the limit-experiences that Benajmin writes about in different ways in terms of mimesis but also as a kind of cosmic experience. Benjamin is very useful when reading affirmations of madness because he draws attention to the importance of such experiences, that whilst archaic, nevertheless survive and return in fragmentary and sometimes liberating, sometimes reactionary forms in contemporary society.

The World Health Organisation International Pilot study identified the complex interrelationship between culture and recovery in schizophrenia in comparisons across a range of different countries and found that ‘something essential to recovery is missing in the social fabric’ of Western societies (Jablensky and Sartorius, 2008, p. 254). Part of the explanation for this may lie in a lack of openness to these experiences of the porous self that persist within Western cultures, but in a secular cultural space where they cannot be shared or recognised (see Luhrmann and Marrow, 2016). As Whitney (1998) noted, psychiatrists will need to redraw their conceptual maps to pay more attention to these experiences within psychosis.

Benajmin’s reflection on such experiences is fundamentally supple and contradictory, but what is of most importance is to think about how these experiences might both interrupt a historical trajectory of experience but also conmingle with contemporary experiences in a range of ways. We cannot just affirm the archaic, pre-modern elements within the experience of madness, without thinking about how that experience arises or returns within contemporary society.

Above all, there is the importance of what Stanghellini (in press) writes of as a ‘fragment-oriented listening’ that can supplement narrative and structural approaches in psychopathology. Benjamin’s essay on surrealism opens with an appreciation of surrealist work, precisely for its attention to fragments that cannot be easily assimilated or taken up as a form of meaning:

Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth, language only seemed itself where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called ‘meaning’. Image and language take precedence. (Benjamin, 1997c, p. 226)

Both narrative and biological approaches to psychosis can, at their worst, be encapsulated as machines where formulas are produced for meaning that can be rolled out on the introduction of a ‘penny-in-the-slot’. An attention to the fragment and to emergent meaning that is both historically and experientially sensitive resists these reductions in the name of a dialectical image of madness.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been much improved by extensive comments and correspondence with George Ikkos and Giovanni Stanghellini. My thanks to both for their incredibly helpful comments and suggestions in writing and improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

Data are available under request to the corresponding author.